In an older blog, I wrote about a recent adoption photo session that went really well for me. I guess I spent far too much time dwelling on the experience. I had an adoption session this past weekend and this time I was drop-kicked by Murphy and his law.
I was scheduled to meet Bernard, a 10 year old Beagle, at the home of his foster family. To save set up time I prepare as much of my equipment ahead of time as I can. For example, I preload all the batteries into my speedlights. My intention is to be fully up in running within minutes as some dogs can have particularly short attention spans. So the idea is to get to snapping long before the dog in question ‘squirrels’.
To my shock and horror my flash refused to fire. My first thought was that something blocked the trigger signal but that was not the case. Was my speedlight broken? Nope. As per usual, the problem existed behind the camera. I had put one of the batteries in upside down. After I loaded it correctly the speedlight fired and we were in business. Or were we? Nope, Murphy was still not done with me.
The speedlight fired and immediately stopped working. At this point I break out into what I can only hope is an internal cold sweat. You see Bernard was already on set and I knew I had to get things going quickly before he stormed back to his trailer. It turns out that I had accidentally switched the main speedlight from Group 1 to Group 3, so basically the two lights weren’t ‘talking’.
Bernard was a consummate professional and he was not at all bothered by the late start. When it was time for him to turn it on, he did and he was a pleasure to work with. Bernard is arthritic and based on what I had read on bio, I was expecting him to be a lot less active and a lot less ambulatory than he ended up being. With ‘dogged’ determination he refused to let his arthritis keep him down.
I am pleased to report that even after the false starts, I was able to come away with a number of images of Bernard that showed him in his best ‘light’. We were even able to shoot outdoors, I was not sure we would have been able to pull that off. The weather network called for snow that day but that did not materialize. Instead we had rain and milder temperatures. It made it difficult to find snow and even more difficult to avoid the less picturesque wet ground.
Once again I invite everyone over to the Speaking of Dogs Rescue website to get more information on Bernard and/or any of their other rescues. Spread the word, let’s get these dogs adopted!